A Critical Caribbean Constellation: Queer Eschatapoetic Visions for (One Hell of) A Great Escape

Abstract

A Critical Caribbean Constellation: Queer Eschatapoetic Visions for (One Hell of) a Great Escape is an interdisciplinary study that investigates and exposes the ways in which both History and neoliberal epistemology function to chronopolitically obscure, obfuscate, and make forget various forms of racialized, gendered, and/or sexualized violence. Given the project’s interest in developing a more critical form of historiography that makes visible, thinkable, and knowable such kinds of violence, it is also a radical, alternative, and intentional departure away from the traditionally secular Marxist method of historical materialism. Following the work of Walter Benjamin, this dissertation uses specifically surrealist artistic aesthetic techniques such as literary montage in order to generate a constellation that juxtaposes together three different figures and images of sex workers in the context of the Caribbean during the first decade of the 21st century. Imbued as they are with a “weak Messianic power” that promises to deliver a “profane illumination,” this specifically critical Caribbean constellation possesses and provides not only a non-secular sense of time but a method of historiography which can help illuminate the past differently while also queering the present. Lastly, it builds on the work of Reza Abdoh’s “queer eschatology” by developing a specifically queer set of “eschatapoetic” visions whose more stereoscopic mode of aesthetics enables the apprehension of three-dimensional depth that can, in turn, reveal a variety of different hidden histories and their related structural violences.